Problem: Lots of people (men especially) don’t wash their hands with soap after using facilities.

First sketch: Many people, don’t wash their hands with soap, especially at shared/public bathrooms.

Solution sketch: A mechanism to encourage people to wash their hands in shared bathrooms. There will be foot-paths that lead to the sink, that light up when the person follows/steps on them. If the person doesn’t step on the foot paths, and goes just to the door after finishing, there will be a sound that goes off saying, “Eew!” or “Really?!” If the the person goes to the sink, the mirror image shows an image of a seductive person that appears if the soap dispenser is dispensed, and the image slowly comes into focus the longer the person washes their hands with soap. When they are finished washing hands, the approach to the door is met with sounds of cheers. The door opening will be lighting up like a casino win or a pretty landscape or fantasy-like environment.

Problem: No one really likes mopping, and then the house gets dirty.

First sketch: The problem is that people don’t want to mop the floor.

Second sketch: Make mopping fun — happy music will play when the mop is used and moved around (the mop will be connected to the person’s iPod or mp3 player), and sad music will be turned on if it has been too long since the last mopping occurred. This idea needs more figuring out. Another variation would be to have the whole floor laden with sensors that would be activated when the mop touched the floor to do something like play happy music.

We set out to create a giant email list, where one person a day would be chosen to send an email to the rest of the list. We called it The Listserve. Our goal was to launch this at 10K subscribers and we reached that goal in much less time than we had anticipated: 5 days. Much of that is due to help from our professor Clay Shirky’s Twitter follower base.

We started by creating a short pitch video in which we asked people what they would say if they could speak to one million people. (And we created the Zena font — my own handwriting!) We got varied answers and a lot of pauses. The video, the site, and just everything implemented was truly a collaborative effort among my groupmates Greg Dorsainville, Alvin Chang, Yoonjo Choi, and Josh Begley.

Here is the video:

The content of the emails has varied, but most have to do with advice on living life well, eating and drinking well (recipes), being thankful, believing in causes, and more. Our aim was to never curate the list, and to never provide a traditional “white comment box” on our site for people to go to. We wanted to see where people were going to take the conversation without this box. We realized that there are already so many existing forums for people to read and participate in. Why recreate it? Subscribers are taking their comments to places that are already comfortable for them, that are literally outside this expected (white comment) box.

It’s been interesting to see the reaction to this project. But I think it’s a bit early to go any further into how I am interpreting this social experiment. And I don’t want to speak for my group too much.

This is my bare bones documentation of what has happened for this project, so far.

For this assignment, we were to play with DOM and Events in Javascript, and to make a page for the app we proposed. Here is what I worked on on the computer, before I tried it on my tablet.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

screen shot of my tablet running the app

The “Get Contacts” button actually does work! But I will have to find a way to select and save a contact from a search, and add it to a list, next time.

Want to KIT button. This might not make it to the next round. It was just to play around with the button functionality and alerts, etc. But I made it have relevant prompts.

Want to KIT button functionality

screen shot of my tablet running the app

code

screen shot of code

how the app’s prototype splash page looks like in the emulator

playing with the examples of DOM and Events

playing with the examples of DOM and Events and forms

playing with the examples of DOM and Events

screen shot of code and events console

accidental foray into search with auto-fill text

Screen Shot of examples

Screen Shot of examples of DOM and Events

Screen Shot of examples of DOM and Events

Screen Shot of examples of DOM and Events

I’m having a hard time slowing down enough to actually absorb what I’m learning, or maybe it’s the other way around… I have some different versions of what I tried to do for my first (attempt) at a mobile splash page.

screen shot of my tablet running the app

screen shot of my tablet running the app; this is where the image button I put in (the orange circle) directs to once pressed. It'll eventually (hopefully) direct to the next page, where the contacts will be chosen, for next time.

The "Get Contacts" button actually does work! But I will have to find a way to select and save a contact from a search, and add it to a list, next time.

Want to KIT button. This might not make it to the next round. It was just to play around with the button functionality and alerts, etc. But I made it have relevant prompts.

Want to KIT button functionality

The “Record a reminder” button doesn’t work. Nothing happened, even though I tried to put the call for it in the code. captureAudio did not seem to work, the way I did it. I need some help on how to move forward. Looking a bit shoddy at this point…